Finding the Lucella turned out to be a larger problem than I’d anticipated. Thunder Bay is an enormous port, even though the town itself doesn’t have more than a hundred thousand people in it. But much of the grain shipped by water in North America passes through that port heading east and south, and the lakefront includes mile upon mile of towering elevators.

My first thought had been to stop in at each elevator to see if the Lucella was docked there, but the miles of towers made that seem like a waste of time. I did go into the yard of the first one I came to. After bumping around the mud-filled ruts, I found a tiny, green-sided office. But a harassed man inside handling the phone assured me that he didn’t have the foggiest idea of where the Lucella was; he only knew she wasn’t there.

I went back into the town and found the local newspaper. As I’d hoped, it listed the ships that were in port and where they were. The Lucella was docked at Elevator 67, the Manitoba Grain Co-op.

There didn’t seem to be any logical order to the yard numbers. I was near number 11, but I went past yard 90 without seeing the Manitoba Grain Co-op and wasted time backtracking. I finally found it another two miles down the road, well past the town.

I turned the Ford into the gravel yard, my heart pounding with nervous anticipation. The Manitoba elevator was enormous, some two hundred giant paper towel tubes banked together. Huge though it was, it didn’t dwarf the ship tied up on its eastern end. The Lucella’s red hulk gleamed sleekly in the late morning sun. Above her, like clouds covering and revealing Mount Everest, hovered a mass of white smoke. Grain dust. The Lucella was loading.

The yard was a mess of gravelly mud. In the corners of the elevator, out of the sun’s reach, a gray-white residue of winter was still melting. I parked clear of the more obvious holes and picked my way through the mud, the metal shards, pasteboard, and grain clumps making up the now familiar elevator scene.

The Smith & Wesson dug uncomfortably into my side as I climbed the Lucella’s ladder to the main deck. I stopped for a minute at the edge of the hardhat area to survey the busy scene and ran a surreptitious finger under the leather holster digging into my diaphragm. Squinting at the whitened figures, I couldn’t be sure if any of my quarry were present. I thought I might recognize Bledsoe’s stocky body, but it was hard to say.

I went into the pilothouse and climbed the four flights to the mahogany-paneled bridge. Only the first mate, Keith Winstein, was there. He looked up in surprise when I came in. He recognized me at once.

“Miss Warshawski! What—is Captain Bemis expecting you?”